Image:
National Museum of American History, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
There is a gender gap in STEM studies (Science, technology, Engineering and Maths) with only 31% girls participating, despite local initiatives to address this. Over a hundred years ago, a mother and daughter were leading the way on Tyneside. Katherine Parsons was often found working closely with her husband Charles on engineering projects, at home and in the factory, including the development of the Parsons steam turbine. As a child, their daughter Rachel was aboard the Turbinia for its speed trials as the fastest sea-going vessel of its day. During the first world war, with men away at the front, Katherine and Rachel recruited and trained thousands of women for mechanical and engineering work. Rachel was recruited to assist the government to promote the work nationally. After the war, firms and trade unions restricted the jobs to returning soldiers and the women’s skills were disregarded. This despite the war having increased the number of single women; by 1918 it was estimated that 1 in 3 women had no income unless they found work. In 1919 Katherine and Rachel co-founded the Women’s Engineering Society which still thrives and promotes training and careers in the sector. Later they established a company specifically to employ women engineers, producing high specification machined work.
Later both made significant contributions in other spheres. Katherine was active in the campaign for votes for women. She was a local magistrate. In July 1919 she was made the first Honorary Fellow of the North-East Coast Institution of Engineers and Ship-builders. In her acceptance speech she noted that women had been required to produce the 'implements of war and destruction' but then were denied 'the privilege of fashioning the munitions of peace’. She is buried at Kirkharle.
Rachel held a number of national roles and campaigned for women’s employment rights, 50 years before the Equal Pay Act. She served on the London County Council and stood for parliament. In later years, a rich heiress, she developed an interest in horse racing.
Might we follow the example of these pioneering local women in the cause of equality at work – and by encouraging our young women today to consider a future in engineering.
Christine Brown
Jack Charlton: Everyman’s Hero
It is over two years since Jack Charlton died and his funeral cortege made its way from the family home in Dalton, to a funeral service at St Mary’s in Ponteland, through the streets of his hometown of Ashington and to the Crematorium in Newcastle. Crowds gathered along the route to pay their respects to ‘Big Jack’, a hero who was one of our own. In October this year, hundreds watched the unveiling of a statue of Jack at Hirst Park in Ashington. It was in this very park that he had played his first games of football as a boy with his little brother Bobby.
His football career is well known; from the pits of Ashington to glory, first with Leeds United and the England team (winning the World Cup in 1966 with brother Bobby) and then as the successful and much-loved manager of the Ireland team (there is also a statue of him at Cork Airport). An excellent biography of Bobby and Jackie Charlton, Two Brothers by Jonathan Wilson was published in 2022 and reveals more about the emergence of these contrasting personalities from an extraordinary football family and football town.
Lots of people in this area felt they knew Jack. He was friendly and approachable and said that he was grateful for the love shown to him. But he was his own man and wasn’t afraid to speak his mind. Proud of his mining heritage and his Ashington roots, he befriended Arthur Scargill when living in Barnsley and supported the miners in the strike of 1984/85. On the other hand, he loved to hunt and shoot and specially to fish – a socialist who loved his field sports.
Perhaps that is why it is so easy to identify with Jack Charlton. He doesn’t fit any sort of mould. He was modest about his football talent, believed in working hard for success, had an irreverent sense of humour and pride in his background and roots. And like all of us he held a unique mixture of beliefs.
John ‘Jack’ Charlton (1935 – 2020) OBE, Honorary Irish Citizen, Freeman of Dublin, Honorary Doctor of Science (Limerick), Deputy Lieutenant of Northumberland, English Football Hall of Fame, World Cup Winner. From Ashington, Northumberland.
Jamie Thompson
The statue (pictured) by Douglas Jennings has senior citizen Jack in his flat cap and fisherman’s jacket, one hand in his pocket and the other holding a football. It is a powerful image of a worldly man with a powerful character and a twinkle in his eye.
Councillor Liam Lavery said: "Everyone loved him, I used to see him walking around having craic with people, he was such a down to earth man. We don't just love him here for his football, it's him as a person - he's an absolute legend."
Josephine Butler: a Northumbrian heroine who deserves more recognition
Ask anyone in your community to name a woman from our region who is remembered for her contribution to our social history and it is likely that they will mention Grace Darling or Emily Wilding Davison. But what about Josephine Butler (1828-1906)?
She lived for forty years in Oxford, Cheltenham, Liverpool, Winchester and London, and is remembered by several blue plaques. However, her life was book-ended by early years (1828-1857) and later years (1894-1906) in Northumberland, mainly in and around Wooler. She is a true Northumbrian heroine, who spent half of her long life in our county, and deserves more local recognition than a small rectangular plaque installed by Wooler WI on the house where she died in 1906 and a bust in the Glendale Centre.
Bronze bust of Josephine Butler in the Glendale Centre by Tom Maley (who also created ‘Robin of Pegswood’)
So, who was Josephine Butler? Born Josephine Elisabeth Grey – a close relative of Earl Grey of Howick, who sits atop a monument in Newcastle – she is variously remembered as a ‘pioneer of first wave feminism’, a ‘social reformer’ and a ‘champion of women’s rights’. After her death in 1906 the feminist leader Millicent Fawcett hailed her as "the most distinguished Englishwoman of the nineteenth century". She campaigned for the rights of women, especially the marginalised. She actively promoted women’s education and gender equality, and was instrumental in the raising of the age of consent to 16.
She is perhaps best known for leading a long and highly contentious campaign against the Contagious Diseases Acts. On January 1, 1870, under her leadership, the Ladies National Association issued a manifesto denouncing the Contagious Diseases Acts as a blatant example of class and sex discrimination. The Acts, it argued, were unconstitutional and deprived disadvantaged women of their legal rights. By detaining women without evidence or trial, and forcing them to submit to a degrading examination, these Acts were a travesty of the rule of law.
It took sixteen years of tireless work before these oppressive measures were finally removed from the statute books. During this time, she was physically assaulted on many occasions. Her family was subject to repeated death threats and several arson attacks. She was pelted with excrement when she stood up to speak, and on one occasion it took fourteen bodyguards to protect her from a violent mob as she moved from a train carriage to address an audience at a town hall.
Josephine Butler was an inspirational woman, so congratulations to Wooler WI and the Glendale Centre for their efforts to remind us of her contributions to social history. However, I believe that her work for the rights of women deserves to be more widely known – not least in her home county.
John Gowing
Rt. Hon Ellen Wilkinson M.P. a.k.a.
This passionate political drama from Northern stage celebrates the life of a real North East hero, Ellen Wilkinson, one of the first female Labour MPs. Representing Middlesborough (1924-31) and more famously Jarrow (1935-47), she was the driving force behind the 1936 Hunger March to London. The action-packed new play charts her rise from humble, working-class, Methodist roots in Manchester to serve in Winston Churchill’s wartime cabinet, and then as Minister for Education in Clement Attlee’s post war government. A founding member of the British Communist Party, she quickly rejected revolutionary socialism in favour of democracy. Like so many in those early years of the twentieth century, she struggled with tensions between anti-war and anti-fascist sentiments, and shared the disappointment of many political idealists as Soviet communism degenerated into an “Animal Farm” of violent oppression.
Her Jarrow Crusade was seen as a failure at the time, but is now believed to have helped form the post-war attitudes to unemployment and social justice. In her final years, she increased the school leaving age to 15 and was instrumental in the establishment of the United Nations and especially UNESCO.
The play by Caroline Bird covers many of these political themes, but its real power is the portrayal of Ellen’s driven passion to “make the world a better place”, perhaps because she could find no lasting peace in the world as she found it? After Ellen’s death in the freezing winter of 1947, aged only 55, her personal papers were burnt. Whether this was for personal or political reasons we will never know, but it meant that the author had quite a bit of imagining to do. Some dialogue and details didn’t quite ring true, but Bettrys Jones portrayed the urgent, restless energy of the title character with a superb performance, - on stage for nearly three hours.
This is a story of energy and political optimism from an age dominated by malevolent dictators, extreme violence and contempt for the truth. That energy and political optimism are what we all need just now!
Bob Turner
(Red Ellen is a Northern Stage, Nottingham Playhouse and Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh co-production. Graphics by permission)
Ironically, a distorted version of Victorian self-help philosophy underpinned the ‘individual responsibility’ promoted by Margaret Thatcher and in particular her attacks on the ‘nanny’ state.
Self-reliance is good. Without it how would we have agency in our lives? We encourage our children to equip themselves to survive, thrive and create choices in their lives. But even as we urge our children to work hard, aim high and assure them that dreams can come true we know that in the race of life some get a head start and some a handicap. Notwithstanding the rags to riches mantras (‘Some people say I’ve been lucky but all I know is that the harder I worked the luckier I got’) we know that for many the odds are stacked.
In contrast to Thatcher’s version, the success of Victorian self-help was as mutual support. Working people collaborated to improve themselves (Workers Education), their workplaces (Trade Unions) and their communities (Friendly Societies and Cooperatives). Sadly, today the reach and influence of such organizations is reduced, and we are again encouraged to believe that our survival, success and happiness are an individual responsibility, about individual strength and deficit.
The poorest in our communities are not individually responsible for the economic crisis but they are most affected by the soaring cost of living. While company profits, dividends bonus payments and salaries are unfettered, is this time to freeze universal credit and benefits? It may be economically difficult to ‘level up’ but it is time to acknowledge that individual hard work, thrift and perseverance, although admirable qualities, will not reduce the stress being experienced by those with the least resources and lowest incomes. Is it time to find ways to support one another and to share the pain of these difficult times fairly?
‘The duty of helping one's self in the highest sense involves the helping of one's neighbours’ – George Stephenson.
Jamie Thompson
Geordie’ Stephenson (1781-1848) was born in Wylam to illiterate parents, taught himself to read and write when he was 18 and became arguably history’s most influential engineer and ‘Father of the Railways’. Meeting Stephenson inspired Samuel Smiles to write the Victorian best seller Self Help (1859). Smiles was a chartist and liberal reformer but in Self Help encouraged working people to be industrious and thrifty, to value life experience and good character, to persevere – and to be kind.
‘The cheapest of all things is kindness, its exercise requiring the least possible trouble and self-sacrifice’ - Samuel Smiles.
George Stephenson
Samuel Smiles
Geordie’s Self Help
A Great Northumbrian Life: Thomas Bewick (1753 - 1828)
"Bewick bookplate" by thelochick is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
‘Place him at the first rank of the great artists not of England only but of all the world and of all time’ (John Ruskin)
The art critic Ruskin refers to Thomas Bewick, whose minutely observed wood engravings reflect his deep understanding of animals, birds and humanity. Bewick, the youngest of eight was raised at Cherryburn (about 6 miles from Heddon) where his father was a tenant farmer. A wild child, he rejected what education he was offered until he became an apprentice engraver in Newcastle. He transformed wood engraving techniques and, in his twenties, established a huge demand for his work. Eventually he published his own books, including ‘A General History of Quadrupeds’ and ‘A History of British Birds’.
Visit Cherryburn (a National Trust property), delight in his work and take Northumbrian pride in his reputation. Bewick was a countryman. However, for much of his life he lived and worked in Newcastle and until his parents died, he walked out to Cherryburn every weekend, whatever the weather. At his workshop on The Side in Newcastle he mentored a dynasty of apprentices who carved successful careers. He never became a wealthy man but through his work he established a network of relationships and friendships with both the rich and powerful and the poor and oppressed.
Bewick lived through a time of seismic change (the agricultural and industrial revolutions). Newcastle was a hotbed of radical debate and activity. Bewick was no revolutionary but cared about natural justice and involved himself in these debates. He opposed the enclosing of common land. ‘The poor man was rooted out and the various mechanics of the villages deprived of all benefits’. He was part of a successful campaign to prevent enclosure of Newcastle’s Town Moor. He campaigned for public access to riversides and against pollution (‘filth from the Manufactories’). He railed against feudal tyranny: ‘the disposition ..which would if it could, sell the sea, and the use of the sun and the rain’.
Bewick was a great artist but also a plain man of his time. He was an active son, parent, husband, friend, neighbour and citizen. Today it seems that fewer of us are prepared to be involved in civic life and in getting our voices heard. Bewick was a great Northumbrian who cared about his community and his countryside. We care too and perhaps his example can inspire us, whatever our opinions, beliefs, concerns or political allegiance to become more active and involved.
Jamie Thompson (December 2021)